I’ve owned by vera for about 24 hours so I’m definitely a newbie. I have successfully included about 5 z-wave devices and when the vera is functioning, pretty much everything works as expected. Earlier today, I got a message that vera can not connect to the Internet. I unplugged it and waited a few minutes and it seemed to help but not for long.
I left the house and tried controlling the unit from the vera app and I could not connect to the unit. When I got home I unplugged again and it functioned for about 5 mins. I went out of wifi range and I lost the unit again on the mobile app.
A friend suggested I try to ping the vera from the computer that is hard wired to the same wireless router as the vera. It will not establish a connection, I can’t get it to ping. Everything I unplug the unit I get maybe 5 mins of functional time. Now in back on wifi and I am able to control it again.
Just for reference, all other wifi and Internet connections work normally… Whatever is going on with the vera is localized to it.
Am I missing something? Shouldn’t I be able to control it when my iPhone is not on wifi?
Naturally, you should be able to control the Vera. Loss of connection after 5 minutes is definitely not normal. A few possibilities exist, that I can see.
Your Vera is not properly configured.
Did you manually configure any network settings or is fully automatic? Are there any other manually configured devices on your network that could be conflicting with Vera via something like a shared IP address.
Something about your network environment is defective/incompatible.
I know you said everything else works, but it can still happen for many reasons.
Try plugging Vera into a different port/switch/router.
The Vera is defective.
Of course you’d have to replace it if it is defective.
Edit: In re-reading your post, I am unclear about the problem. Is your issue that Vera is losing its network connection or are you only having problems with mobile device apps? When you have the issue, are you able to access the Vera UI from a wired PC and browser or do you have to reboot the Vera regardless?
Zwaver - I appreciate your reply. In re-reading my own post and doing a little more testing I am not sure that I don’t have multiple issues here…
I’m so confused now I don’t know what to try and fix.
Here’s where I’m at with it today.,I woke up and used the iphone app and it works normally. I go to the computer and I try to open the vera there and I get an error msg that it won’t connect to the Internet. I push reload and it works.
So, as a test, I turn wifi off on my iphone so I’m off the home network and I immediately lose connectivity of the unit. Turn wifi back on and I’ve got full control again.
It’s like I’m facing 2 separate issues… One is that I’m intermittently losing Internet connectivity on my PC with the vera. Two is that I can not control it from the mobile app when I’m off my home wifi. Are the two connected?
I am using an AT&T modem/router (they call it a gateway) all in one. It has 4 Ethernet ports. I have tried the vera in both open ports w/ the same results. The only other devices connected are my home PC and a directv whole home module.
A friend tried to help me out and told me to ping it. I get host unreachable even if the vera is working…when I ping the address that I see in the IE address bar () then I can ping with good results.
And, I was able to use the mobile app on my home network even when the vera said it couldn’t connect to the Internet using the home PC. Like I said, I’m majorly confused here.
After my last post I restarted the computer and this is the error message I get. However, I can use the mobile app right now to control the vera as long as I’m on the wifi. Even with the vera saying it can not connect to the Internet… I tested the app and that works. This makes no Sense to me.
There are three different levels, for lack of a better word, of issues here. They may or may not all be related, but in order to resolve the issues we must start at the beginning and eliminate each one in order.
When you say that you can ping your Vera’s address and access the GUI from your browser, even when you are having other problems, that means that the Vera is properly connected to your local network and there are probably not any physical or hardware problems. So, it sounds like Vera is fine and your network is fine.
When Vera says that it cannot connect to the internet, what it really means is that it cannot connect to the MiOS.com servers over the internet. This could be caused by a firewall blocking or damaging the connection, the servers being down, DNS resolution issues, internet outages…
The next time Vera says it cannot connect to the internet, click Setup → Net & Wifi → Troubleshoot Network. We will be especially interested in any tests that fail, but you may wish to post the entire results here. If you do post the entire listing, you may want to remove the External IP: from the listing.
When you get step 2 completed and Vera working properly, you can then move to iPhone app connectivity issues. You never said which app you are using and it is an important detail since different ones behave differently. App issues are frequently caused by improper app configuration. But, app issues can also be caused by internet connectivity problems on the iPhone, problems with the MiOS.com servers, and more.
Ok I agree with your path - I read somewhere that if vera can’t access the Internet at all that the date and time would be wrong, and it seems to hold the date and time… So it sounds like you are correct in your assessment that it can’t connect to mios - seems like not a hardware issue now…
Here’s the test result
GATEWAY: OK
DNSSERVER1: OK
GOOGLE.COM FAIL
STA server FAILED
EVT server FAILED
TS server tunnel connection: FAILED
FWD server: FAILED
FWD server tunnel connection: FAILED
SSH_TUNNELS: NONE
I hope this helps! What do I do now?
Maybe this is why it won’t communicate off the home network, but like you said, one thing at a time. But I am using an iPhone 4S with the mi casa verde vera free app. When I’m on home network it works flawlessly. When I’m off wifi I get the red for in between the two green arrows as to indicate it can’t connect to the vera.
Thanks for your help so far, I am confident we will find the solution.
The inability to reach Google makes me think this might be a DNS resolution issue. Do you know how to use SSH?
Re-reading your post, I see you mention that this is on AT&T service. What type of gateway are they using? Is it a Uverse 2Wire gateway? And, if so, do you have many other devices accessing the internet or any P2P file sharing going on?
I do not know how to use SSH, I am not familiar with that.
I am using at AT&T DSL gateway not uverse. It has the wireless router built in and four Ethernet ports on the back. The only other wireless devices I use in the house are iPhones iPods and and iPad. My TV also has wifi built in but I rarely use it. I have one other device plugged into it, a directv deca module.
I don’t know if this will help in diagnosis or not, but the vera did function normally for the first 24 hours or so. I did not get these loss of Internet messages at first. So I wonder if something has adapted to it and is blocking the communication somehow…? But I don’t know what it could be. I rarely use this computer anymore.
I was troubleshooting today while posting and I found that the firewall in my modem/router was blocking the vera… A friend helped me change some settings and so far so good. At least at this point, I can’t blame the vera. The router just didn’t like the tunnel to the mios server I guess… I’m going to give it a day or so and see.
It’s unusual, though not impossible, for a firewall to allow a connection for 5 minutes and deny it after that. If this does indeed fix your issue and the original firewall settings were default and not something you did, please come back and post the details of precisely which firewall/router you are using and how you fixed it, so that others may benefit in the future.
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